Every registrar pays the same wholesale price for a .com domain. So why does one charge you $10.18 a year to keep it and another charges $22.99? Because the first-year price is bait, the renewal is the business — and most people never compare renewals until the charge lands. This ranking fixes that: it is sorted by the only column that matters.
First, the $10.44 every registrar pays
A .com registration has a fixed wholesale cost: $10.26 goes to Verisign (the .com registry) and $0.18 is the ICANN fee — $10.44 in total. Any price above that is registrar markup. A checkout total below it exists only where a registrar subsidises the difference — and one does: Spaceship, Namecheap’s budget brand, totals $10.18, below the wholesale cost, as a loss-leader to win customers. Keep that number in mind while reading the table: it tells you instantly who is fair and who is farming you.
| Registrar | 1st year | Renewal/yr | 5-year cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Spaceship | $8.88 | $10.18 | $49.60 |
| Cloudflare | $10.44 | $10.44 | $52.20 |
| Dynadot | $10.88 | $10.88 | $54.40 |
| Porkbun | $11.08 | $11.08 | $55.40 |
| Namecheap | $11.28 | $18.48 | $85.20 |
| Hostinger | $2.49 | $19.99 | $82.45 |
| IONOS | $1.00 | $20.00 | $81.00 |
| GoDaddy | ~$0.99–$4.99 | $22.99 | ~$96.95 |
Prices checked 24 October 2026. Five-year cost = first year + four renewals, before taxes.
Why first-year prices lie
A registrar that sells you a .com for $1 loses about $9.44 on the spot. It happily pays that because acquiring a customer with a live website, business email and brand attached to the domain is worth far more: the renewal, the hosting upsell, the privacy add-on, the email package. The loss is recovered from year two onward — from you, automatically, by card on file. The cheaper the first year looks, the harder the renewal usually bites. GoDaddy and IONOS are the textbook cases; Hostinger pairs genuinely good hosting with a domain renewal ($19.99) you should simply never pay — keep the hosting, move the domain.
The ranking, explained
Cloudflare ($10.44) is the benchmark: it sells at exact wholesale cost with free WHOIS privacy, forever. The one condition is that your domain must use Cloudflare’s free DNS — fine for most websites, and the reason most of our own recommendations start here.
Spaceship ($10.18 total renewal) — a $9.98 list price plus the $0.20 ICANN fee at checkout — currently comes in below even Cloudflare’s $10.44 at-cost price, with a clean modern dashboard. That is possible because Spaceship is Namecheap’s budget brand and runs the price as a subsidised loss-leader; always verify the final total at checkout. Subsidised pricing may not last forever, which is an argument for locking in multi-year renewals while it does. Porkbun ($11.08) is the best all-rounder: flat pricing on registration, transfer and renewal, free privacy, and none of Cloudflare’s DNS condition. Dynadot ($10.88) is the quiet professional’s choice, popular with portfolio owners.
The marked-up tier — Namecheap, Hostinger, IONOS, GoDaddy — is not selling a better domain. A .com is a .com; DNS, privacy and transfers are commodities now. You are paying for brand advertising and support headcount, whether you use them or not.
One warning about the future
Verisign is permitted to raise .com wholesale prices by up to 7% a year in four of every six years, and increases are expected through 2030. Every registrar’s renewal will creep up — which makes two moves smart today: choose a low-markup registrar, and consider renewing valuable domains for multiple years to lock current pricing. And whatever you do, mark the date in your calendar 30 days before expiry so the decision is yours, not your card’s.